Music, Mother's Day and Genetics

I just realized that I never blogged about how Romy's music therapy has been going. She's been in it for about a month and a half now and it's been really wonderful.  She works one on one with her therapist and it mainly consists of singing songs, playing instruments and stuff like that. It doesn't sound like much but it works! They use techniques that I can't really explain clearly but it just has this beautiful effect on Romy. She strums away on ukulele's and "sings" along to her own music. Her favorite by far is the piano. She'll bang away and giggle and talk. Lately she's been saying "Play? Me play? You play?" or "Look" to bring your attention to her piano playing.  She has even begun to sing along with the actual words (other than coo's and babbles) in one particular song. Oddly enough, it wasn't her therapist that pulled it out of her, it was none other than Justin Bieber.  Romy goes absolutely crazy for his song "Baby" and will sing the word 'baby' over and over when it's on. It's so adorable. Oh and just so you know, I don't listen to Justin Bieber- I have a 10 year old obsessed niece.  Just sayin.

Anyway, Mother's day has come and gone and it was spent relaxing at home. Honestly, I was still beat from our Maui vacation that I just didn't feel up to doing much. Ray and Romy got me a few books and let me take a delicious 2 hour nap. Ray also did the dishes unprompted (completely unheard of!) and that was all it took to make me have a wonderful Mother's day.

I also never blogged about Romy's genetics evaluation. As most of you know there has been some concern about some of Romy's puzzling symptoms for some time now. Back in Texas they were thinking she possibly had a certain syndrome but that has now been ruled out. While that was a huge relief, they still aren't 100% sold on ruling out any kind of genetic malformation. They are definitely leaning towards ruling it out but we're still kind of stuck in genetic limbo. They think that there's a huge possibility that  Romy's CP, size and delays are completely explained by her extreme prematurity but because there is no concrete reason for my troubled pregnancy and Romy's ridiculous eyebrows they want to do another blood test to see if anything pops up. She's already had 3 and they've been normal thus far so we're pretty positive. Back to her funky eyebrows, Ray and myself could not think of one person in our families that had eyebrows like she does. Then one day my biological father's face popped in my head. I remember he had super thick unruly brows but the memory was still a bit fuzzy. So I emailed him my concern and he looked over her pictures and is completely sold on her having his and my aunt's (his sister) eyebrows. I'm trying to get a hold of some pictures so I can bring it by the genetics office. Hopefully it will match up and we can get one step closer to ruling everything out completely. Fingers are crossed.

This is Romy's new face. She does it whenever she doesn't get her way. Such a funny girl.

This is how I found her this morning. Although she's been able to push herself into the sitting position for months, she's never done so in her crib. I think it's time to lower it all the way. Once we can teach her to safely get down off of furniture, we'll make it a toddler bed! Also, you see that hair? Say goodbye to it, Daddy finally caved and gave the green light to cut it!